Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior

66. Seelenverwandtschaft¹

¹ Ask a German.

The organization allows a particular team to shortcut even the most fundamental rules of its development process.

Here are some of the traits you first notice about this kind of team:

• They revile scheduled meetings, but they hold lots of small, ad-hoc meetings, of which nearly all are—or soon become—design sessions.

• They prefer white boards to other media for writing down ideas, designs, and to-do lists.

• They work from incomplete, high-level requirements statements. They often skip written design documents altogether, and they move on to coding very early in the development process.

• They throw ...